Critical Race Studies Research Articles

Listening to the Margins: Reflecting on Lessons Learned From a National Conference Focused on Establishing a Qualitative Research Platform for Childhood Disability and Race

The late Black feminist scholar, bell hooks, suggested that the margin can be a place of radical possibility, where marginalized people nourish their capacity for collective resistance. On the margin, it is possible to generate a counter-language. In this paper, we chronicle, describe and reflect upon how bell hooks' ideas inspired the creation of a national 2-day conference titled, ‘Listening to the Margins’. This conference was focused on understanding the intersectional experiences of childhood disability and race with a view to better supporting racialized disabled children, youth, and their families. This conference was needed because intersectional experiences of childhood disability and race have been silenced in childhood disability studies, critical race studies, and various other resistance-oriented systems of thought. Racialized children with disabilities and their families are often unsupported as they navigate Euro-centric healthcare systems. Reflecting on lessons learned from our conference, we suggest several strategies for advancing meaningful research programs with racialized disabled children. Strategies include centering the art of listening, amplifying the margin, engaging the arts to promote empathy, embracing psychosocial support in work on ableism and racism, developing clinical tools and practices that are grounded in lived patient experiences, and advancing decolonizing research that recognizes the role research has historically played in perpetuating colonial violence. In totality, this article unpacks how sitting on the margins, as bell hooks suggested, has allowed us to occupy a place of discomfort and creativity necessary to disrupt dominant discourses. In so doing, we have made space for the hidden narratives of racialized disabled children and their families.

Resisting Ableism in School-Based Speech-Language Therapy: An Invitation to Change.

Resisting Ableism in School-Based Speech-Language Therapy: An Invitation to Change.

Anti‐Judaism versus anti‐Semitism: The racialization of Jews in late antiquity

AbstractThis article interrogates the arbitrary distinctions made between “anti‐Judaism” and “anti‐Semitism” by contextualizing the treatment of Jews in Roman late antiquity within the broader framework of premodern critical race studies. It illustrates the value of employing models such as racialization and monstrification when reconstructing the various iterations of anti‐Jewish prejudice that populate the long history of Christianity. More specifically, it outlines the modes of racialization utilized in two fourth‐century Christian writings: Eusebius's two‐part apology and the Pseudo‐Hegesippus. While Eusebius's work serves as an example of the racialization of Jews through ethnographic mythmaking, the so‐called Pseudo‐Hegesippus demonstrates the use of monstrification in the service of creating an affective culture of fear and hatred toward Jews. Such examples of Christian race‐making in late antiquity contribute to the task of tracing the developments of premodern race beyond the medieval period and disrupts the arbitrary and limiting distinctions made between anti‐Judaism and anti‐Semitism.

Mixedness and Intersectionality: The Use of Relief Maps to Understand the Experiences of Multiracial Women of African Descent in Spain

This article analyzes the experiences of multiracial women of African descent in Catalonia, Spain—looking at their identity processes, social relations, experiences of racialization and discrimination, and strategies of resistance—using a novel qualitative research method called “Relief Maps,” a very useful tool for the study of social inequalities from an intersectional and multilocational perspective. Relief Maps are a data collection tool and a means of visualizing and analyzing data—providing a graphical representation of interviewee narratives that discuss processes of social inclusion and exclusion. The maps represent three dimensions of experience: (1) psychological (indicating the respondent’s level of discomfort or well-being); (2) geographical (including at least five physical or experiential locations: e.g., home, street, work, school); and (3) social (examining seven social variables or aspects of identity: i.e., gender, ethnicity/skin color, age, sexual orientation, social class, physical appearance, and religion). In this way, the maps show where greater or lesser well-being or discomfort is experienced by the respondent based on each aspect of identity, thus indicating personal places of oppression, places of controversial intersections, neutral places, and places of relief. We argue that this supplementary investigative technique is highly relevant to research in the social sciences, particularly in the field of mixed-race, critical race, and ethnic studies, as it provides an intersectional, reflective, nuanced, and contextual lens for understanding complex social phenomena, leading to information of greater analytical strength.

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging and Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's <i>The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging</i> and Claudia Rankine's <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>

Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England. Urvashi Chakravarty. RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern 2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. x + 296 pp. $65.

Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England. Urvashi Chakravarty. RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern 2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. x + 296 pp. $65.

The Moving Target: Brazilian Pardo Identity and its Constitution of Racial Space

In the field of Critical Race Studies, Brazil continually proves to be a unique case with its diverse population, incredible nuanced racial classification system, and claim to “racial democracy” and transcending its history of racism and slavery. At the heart of these claims is a large pardo, or mixed race, population that is often characterized as the apex of Brazilianness and multiraciality. The mixed-race body is romanticized and the entire Brazilian populous is placed in a racialized “third space” beyond the recognized system of Black and white identities. How do pardo people conceptualize themselves in this idealized world of racial democracy? How do the systems of Brazil’s history and national identity formation impact the modern understanding of mixed identity? Where do mixed-race people fit in the spectrum of racialized space— if they even do? This project will examine the history of miscegenation, critical race theory, media discourse, and Brazilian census data to evaluate the space that pardo bodies take up in Brazil. Through analyzing and contextualizing these components with the experiences of pardo people, this work will put into focus the moving target that is mixed-race identity in Brazil. As a result, the study will contribute a new perspective of spatiality to mixed- race discourse as well as question our perceptions of racial identity and who it benefits.

Racial Disgust in Early Modern England: The Case of Othello

The ongoing development of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) is perhaps the most exciting intellectual current in early modern studies today.1 In this essay, I attempt to put the vital insights of this research into conversation with scholarship from another prominent subfield: the interdisciplinary study of emotion.2 I do so through a reading of Othello, in which I argue that the circulation of racial meaning in Othello’s Venice is intimately tied to the circulation of affective meaning—and that the inscription of racial identity onto Othello by the inhabitants of Venice is fundamentally an emotional process. More specifically, I will suggest that the affective mode of disgust plays a central role in how Othello is perceived by others in the play. While few would deny that jealousy is the dominant (and most explicitly articulated) emotion in Othello, I argue that racialized disgust is what more precisely animates Iago’s plot to undo his master, serving both as a personal motivator and as an instrument by which he poisons how Othello is perceived by others.

Corporate Personhood as the New Leviathan

This essay situates Lisa Siraganian’s important book, Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons, within the law and literature field and in relation to the more specialized subfields of literature and liberalism, legalism, and critical race studies of fugitive property. It discusses Siraganian’s nuanced account of corporate personhood, exploring its implications for legal arguments pertaining to fetal personhood post-Dobbs, and for broader political struggles over dignity, recognition, due process, and bodily autonomy.

Critical race studies in qualitative research: a review and future directions

In 2021, former President Donald Trump issued a presidential memo halting and prohibiting “divisive” and “anti-American propaganda” in federal contracting--described as “any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training and propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil”. Unsurprisingly, the concerted attack against CRT grossly misunderstands what CRT is and often equates teaching about individual racism, privilege, unconscious bias, systemic racism, and U.S. history with the teaching of CRT. As of October 2021, 28 states have restricted education on racism, bias, and the teaching of CRT.

Premodern Critical Race Studies and the Question of History

N/A

Analyzing social wrongs

Analyzing social wrongs

Nocoastjazz

Nocoastjazz

Systemic Racism in Communication Sciences and Disorders Academic Programs: A Commentary on Trends in Racial Representation.

As a discipline, communication sciences and disorders (CSD) has struggled to address equity and inclusion for students, professionals, and scholars from historically excluded racial groups. Recent publications in this periodical that have begun to confront systemic racism in the discipline have been met with some expected resistance. In this commentary, I attempt to support and expand an argument made by Ellis and Kendall (2021), namely, that systemic racism has been and continues to be a normal and persistent feature of our academic programs. A comparison to U.S. Census data suggests that Asian, Black, Indigenous, Native, Latino/a/e, and multiracial CSD professionals are represented to a drastically lower rate compared with their representation in the population at large. Furthermore, publicly available data summaries indicate that there is a reduction in the level of racial diversity that is associated with an increase in White representation across the entire progression of the professional training and certification process, with the greatest level of diversity at the undergraduate level followed by the graduate and professional levels. A general knowledge of social and legal history in the United States would suggest that the relative reduction in representation across the academic and professional levels of the CSD disciplines results from policy and practice patterns that serve to preserve a White-dominant culture in our profession and exclude People of Color. Continued efforts broadly based in critical race studies may prove as a useful tool to identify, confront, and transform current policy and practice patterns in our national organization, academic programs, and accrediting bodies that have produced and sustained levels of inequality and White dominance in our programs and disciplines.

:Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England

:<i>Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England</i>

:Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures

:<i>Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures</i>

:World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture

:<i>World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture</i>

:Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater

:<i>Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater</i>

Transborder DisCrit: Dreaming Across Disjunctures from Mexico

ABSTRACT Drawing from an ethnographic study with U.S.-born children who had relocated to their parents’ hometowns in Mexico, we engaged transborder and dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit) frameworks to understand the compounding, deterritorialized ways undocumentedness and dis/ability shape educational experiences across borders. In this article, we focus on the experiences of two familias and argue that a transborder DisCrit framing is necessary to reveal how undocumented parents advocate and dream across disjunctures in search of access to educational supports and humanizing futures for their children with dis/abilities across the countries they call home. Findings reveal how intersecting forms of undocumentedness, or exclusion from papers for access and belonging, constrained families’ access to movement across geopolitical borders, schooling and health-care institutions, and documented diagnoses needed to access learning supports. In the implications, we explore what approaches to policy, education, and research might look like if they centered the experiences, subaltern knowledges, and humanizing dreams of transborder parents.

On the Shimmer of the Black Madonna

ABSTRACT This article argues that the ambiguity and scarcity of the evidence for the existence of the Black Madonna before the year 1500 need not prevent medievalists practicing premodern critical race studies from pursuing further study of her early history. Applying the work of Cord Whitaker on the “shimmer of blackness” in the medieval archive and of Karin Vélez on the mutability of the coloration of the Madonna across time and space, I make the case that the textual record on either side of 1500, before and after, bears witness to the Black Madonna according to discernible, coherent, and continuous rhetorical patterns, although in ways that are shimmeringly ambiguous. This record describes the Black Madonna by means of a consistent grammar of euphemism, circumlocution, negation, insinuation, and paradox that associates her darkness with materiality, mystery, and miraculous power. I trace these patterns across commentary on the Black Madonna ranging from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing in particular on the histories of Our Lady of Walsingham and Our Lady of Willesden.